bookstore café bar

When we visited New York City, we ambled Queens (such is our lot), and we remarked on how the City cannot simply paint some section of pavement a beige color and claim it is now the sidewalk. Visiting the City is an experience in always half-needing to piss, always being slightly near to passing out, walking to nowhere and vivisecting nothing of your surroundings — and in all our rained-on wandering, we stumble into a combination bookstore/café/bar; I am enmeshed. To this I imagine troupes of dissatisfied (dissatisfied as in back home) locals, who sarcastically disregard the shop as so-awfully trite — my own commentary — see, look how up its own ass that place is — though I am informed such businesses are actually quite common in Queens, and normal — I must only be ashamed of my enjoyments again. We elect to kill time here despite needing to attend some event, because, “one cannot show up too early” — I concur, and add: “yes, we have nothing but time.” Quiet, amicable murmurings are shared, sitting alongside one another; I sit further still among the dimly-lit pop-rock. I wish back home had a bookstore, café, or bar, at all. But such amenities are painfully absent. We drink together for the first time, and I observe benignly: I take shots in a manner suggesting alcoholic conviction, and she sips gently. She sips so gently. I am suddenly stricken with the knowledge that we are two different people with, irreparably, two different ways of living — though we are here together? Can it be helped? It is nobody’s fault, it is upsettingly tragic and maybe even like a French film I had once seen. She does not think her life is like some French film at all. I say to a future love I do not have: picture this scene: and imagine it directed by your favorite director: not even my favorite yours: All is incandescent yellow, I am next to my girlfriend, herein sat at the New York City bookstore/café/bar, and my thoughts shift once, twice, more to the lack of bars in our own town (I was living there at the time). And then I cannot stand to return from this urban generosity tomorrow, because: I now know, in two weeks’ time, I will leave my girlfriend. But get this: in the scene, my actress is smiling. Can you still love me, knowing that?